Pupil (iPhone) Free
Google recently released the ability to search its servers from its mobile app by snapping a picture with the iPhone’s camera. Pupil works the same way, except instead of getting information from a search engine, it sends your photo and question about it to real people.
A sort of crowd-sourced answer system that sounds a little more legitimate than a similar system such as the various answer communities scattered around the web, Pupil has you take a picture and attach a question about it. Your answer comes back to you in an e-mail.
GrubHub update (iPhone, Android) Free
This free app that connects you to restaurants that deliver in your area is new to Android and getting an update on the iPhone.
For Android users, the app is in a beta stage now, but it carries the same functionality as the iPhone app. Pop open GrubHub and it uses your GPS data to find nearby delivery options. The app then connects you to ratings and menus for the restaurants you choose before you place your order. GrubHub lets you save places you particularly like so you can find them quickly later and search results can be filtered by the type of food they offer.
The biggest change to the iPhone app seems to be the ability to sign into an existing, web-based GrubHub account from the app, or start a new account. For users who already like and make use of the GrubHub service online, the app now works in tandem with that, which should mean transferring saved payment information and saved favorite restaurants.
Record and Protect (iPhone) $1.99
I recently listened to a story on National Public Radio in which a police officer made thousands of recordings of his superiors asking him and other officers to do illegal things. At the time I thought, “Wow, that guy was really smart to record everything.”
Behold, the power to be as smart as that guy.
Record and Protect isn’t necessarily made for doing thousands of recordings in a several-month sting operation, but it does put together up to six minutes of recorded ambient audio for you from your iPhone. That lets the iPhone record discreetly without your input in sensitive cases, which is what the app is built for.
But the really cool feature, although maybe a little paranoid, is that the app immediately exports the recorded audio to a remote server, protecting it from whoever you’re recording or from being lost along with your phone if it’s broken or “missing.”
Don’t go crazy, though. As the app description warns, secretly recording people isn’t always perfectly legal.
Web Research (iPad) $3.99
The iPad doesn’t really have any sort of word processing applications, and while it’s great for browsing the Internet, it can be a pain for research if there’s no good way to take virtual notes.
Web Research provides the space for note-taking with a simple word processor. It’s specifically designed to copy and paste from the Internet and supports a variety of paste functions, from just pulling down the text to maintaining the formatting or even pulling whole sections of HTML to preserve what you saw online. All that copied stuff, plus any notes you want to add, can then be saved and accessed later.
Pixels Pro (iPad) $9.99
Pixels Pro is a touch-interface graphics editing program that’s designed to be a little more powerful than some of the other apps on the market. The editor includes some of the standard options you’d see in Adobe Photoshop or other graphics editors, like the ability to add filters and to edit multiple layers on an image.
If you’re familiar with graphics editing, you’ll recognize most of these simple features, but the app hopes to garner attention with its use of the touch interface to make a more intuitive editing experience. Either way, Pixels Pro can import and export PSD (Photoshop) files, so you can go back and forth between working on a more traditional computer and your iPad.
